Shark Drunk

by Morten Stroksnes

  Maybe this has something to do with all the abandoned objects. Almost everything is still here from when the fishing station was operating. Aside from small items that were taken away, and others that may have been stolen over the years, most things remain exactly where they were left. Many tons of heavy nets and coils of rope are piled in the corners. Wooden brine tubs are still filled with salt. A glazed crust has formed on top, but all you have to do is punch a hole through it to get to the salt. The Aasjords have enough salt on hand to last for ten generations or so.

  In many of the small rooms I see work clothes hanging on hooks, as if the next shift will soon come in the door. But the clothes probably belonged instead to the crews of fishing boats, most of them beached long ago. And the workers themselves who were young the last time they were here are either old or dead by now. Other personal belongings, kitchen equipment, and delivery slips for fish are scattered around the former living quarters. In an old office, there are even completed delivery reports hanging on the wall. They show a record of how many stockfish the station bought during the first three months of 1961 (112,727 kilos, almost 250,000 pounds), how much was in production, how much was sold and delivered, et cetera. The chart has a separate column for “Goods Sent to Bergen.”

  All the station’s products were meticulously recorded: raw fish, salt fish, dried fish (of various qualities), liver (untreated, preserved in alcohol, or boiled), all sorts of oils (centrifuged cod liver oil, hot-pressed oil, sour oil, ind. pressed oil, and finally: “other oils”). The report continues with roe (raw, sugar salted), salted scrap fish, fish heads, and at the very bottom of the form: liver graks, meaning the waste left over after steaming the cod livers.

  Many years of work haunt this building, from the moment the first nails were pounded into the boards until the last tenant left the place. The fishing station is a marinade of memories. I imagine invisible clocks hanging on the walls in the various sections, all of them showing different times. None of them shows the current time; most stopped working decades ago.

  —

  In the 1980s, the fishing station was bought by two Finns, and they also left traces behind. They are still alive, somewhere in Finland. Her name is Pirrka, and his is Pekka. She’s a renowned psychologist, and he’s a documentary filmmaker. In the 1970s, he made ethnographic films in remote countries, and many of his films have achieved cult status. Two educated and cultivated Finns who spoke quietly, thoughtfully, and only sporadically, at least on those occasions when I’ve met them. In fact, they spoke as if they were in a sauna, even when they were freezing cold—and that happened often in Skrova. He was interested in flowers, and there are lots of them in an amazingly warm and lush valley out toward Hattvika, in the middle of Skrova. If you head in that direction, you don’t expect to see much more than rocks and crags, maybe some gullies and ravines. But suddenly you find yourself in the center of a glade.

  In the rooms where Pirrka and Pekka lived, there are still big stacks of the Finnish newspapers Hufvudstadsbladet and Ilta-Sanomat. Hanging on the wall is a satellite photo of the Finnish-Swedish archipelago, which is called saaristomaailma in Finnish. There are thousands of tightly packed little islands in a wide belt between Finland and Sweden. A gap of about twelve miles is what makes it possible for ships to slip into the Gulf of Bothnia.

  Only the gods know how Pirrka and Pekka ever found their way to Skrova. But they fell in love with the place and bought Aasjord Station when they were traveling north and happened to hear it was for sale. Neither of them was young. Each summer they spent a few weeks of vacation here. They lived in a small corner of one building—like dethroned aristocrats who had lost all their money and titles but insisted on barricading themselves inside a tiny space in their dilapidated castle. Even though they clearly were infatuated with Skrova and Aasjord Station, they seemed overwhelmed and a bit out of place in these surroundings. Someone in their family or circle of friends must have been into diving (the rubber boat they used, now punctured, is still lying outside), and maybe that was who persuaded the couple to buy a huge fishing station on a little island in Lofoten. Every summer lots of Finns left their green coasts and lovely lakes to visit Skrova and go diving with wetsuits, flippers, belts of lead, and harpoon guns. Most of their gear still hangs on hooks in the station. Pekka and Pirrka didn’t go diving, but they were definitely in over their heads.

  In the end, they let Aasjord Station return to the Aasjord family. It has been fifteen years since Pekka and Pirrka left Skrova. Hugo talks about them as if they might show up at any minute, but that’s not likely to happen.

  —

  One afternoon when the weather is too bad for us to go out fishing, Hugo and I end up in the attic. The space is filled from floor to ceiling with old gear. You could actually start your own fishing station and cod-liver-oil mill with all this equipment, which is more than one hundred years old. We find boilers, presses, oil vats, separators, pipes, grindstones, net floats, and Bismar scales; hoisting devices with pulleys, gears, and winches, huge washing vessels made of wood, electrical motors, landing nets with shafts many yards in length, herring landing nets, and mysterious tools made of wood and metal. In one room there are dozens of oak barrels for cod liver oil. Some are stamped “medicinal oil,” others “sour oil.” Several smaller barrels may have once held cognac, since smuggling is commonplace along all coasts. The purse seiner Seto, for instance—which doubled as a freighter that made trips to the continent in the off-season—was notorious for its smuggling activities, which were well known even to the customs officials.

  The technology on display in the attic is simultaneously outdated and advanced. Much of it was made on-site and developed over hundreds of years by mechanics, coopers, carpenters, smiths, rope makers, and local self-taught smart guys who could solve any problem using whatever they had on hand in terms of materials and tools. But as far as I’m concerned, much of it is highly puzzling. I point at a strange little device with a steel sluice at the top. Obviously something was meant to go in one end and come out the other. It looks as if it should be attached to some other piece of machinery.

  “That thing over there? It’s a scale scraper for pollock, of course,” says Hugo as he keeps walking.

  “Oh, sure. Of course. It’s not a haddock scraper, it’s a pollock scraper. I couldn’t really tell in this dim light,” I reply.

  Hugo looks at me and laughs.

  —

  Every time we discover another obscure object, Hugo starts what I can only describe as sparring with it. He dances around it, jabbing out his hands at varying heights as he speculates about the specific object’s form and function. In his attempts to wrest the secret of its use, he might point to where something could be inserted or ejected, or focus on something that’s supposed to rotate and determine which way it should be turned, or notice how one part interlocks with another, and so on. Finally he comes up with a theory he’s happy with, and it usually sounds convincing to me too.

  Now, I see to my satisfaction that he has come to a standstill at the very back of the attic. He’s looking at some sort of cast-metal pulley with two wheels, a handle, and several protrusions made of steel. The whole gadget is five feet long and barely reaches to our knees.

  “Give me a week and I’ll figure it out,” he says.

  “You have twenty-four hours,” I tell him.

  Hugo sometimes seems like an absentminded professor, and there’s no doubt he could have created strange mechanical devices from all the junk up in the attic. Machines for utilitarian purposes as yet undiscovered. Motors powered by electric eels and lubricated with oil from a Greenland shark.

  But first we need to catch the shark, of course.

  15

  In the evening we occasionally watch TV, always turning to one of the animal channels. They apparently broadcast nonstop programs about whales and sharks, complete with darkly dramatic music, and a lot of things depicted as dangerous! bestial! monstrous!—especially when sharks are inv
olved. The animals are presented in an almost medieval way, judged as moral or amoral creatures whose thought processes are more or less the same as our own. The whales are mostly nice, almost bourgeois, with their nuclear families, their songs, games, and child rearing at the center of their lives, between mostly vegetarian meals and vacation-like trips through the oceans of the world.

  But once in a while clips are shown that break with the pattern. In one program, a female free diver tries to befriend a pilot whale. The whale grabs hold of her foot and drags her down at least thirty feet, which is deep for a human being. There it lets go, allowing her to return to the surface, where she gasps for air. Then the whale pulls her under again and holds on until she almost drowns. The whale is not biting her, just keeping a firm but careful hold on her foot. The animal seems to be playing with the woman’s life. After several more times up and down in the water column, her movements start to get lethargic. She’s about to lose consciousness. The pilot whale clearly senses exactly how much the woman can take, and when she’s half dead, it shoves her up to the surface. She is rescued by the same whale that almost drowned her. A good whale/bad whale scenario played out by one creature.

  There’s no real moral to the story other than to surmise that whales are intelligent animals and they don’t automatically feel kindness or empathy toward humans. They do whatever suits them. Like all intelligent creatures, it’s possible for whales to display deviant, if not exactly psychotic, behavior.

  —

  After four days I wake up with a feeling that something’s not right. I lie in bed for a moment, wondering what it could be before I finally figure it out. The wind is no longer slamming rain against the outside wall. It’s utterly quiet. Hugo is up and has already been out to inflate the boat.

  “Ready to go out and feed the shark?” I ask.

  “First we’ve got to get some bait, then we can feed the shark,” replies Hugo.

  This time, lacking a Scottish Highland bull, we’re going to use some whale blubber, waiting for us at the Ellingsen facility, just across from Aasjord Station. We zip across Skrovkeila sound, which is barely three hundred feet wide, and pick up the box of whale blubber plus a trash bag containing four salmon. All free of charge. The box holds fifty pounds of blubber, cut from the belly of a minke whale. It was frozen immediately, then taken out of the freezer two days ago, but there is still some ice on it. The skin is as white as chalk. The whole piece of blubber is shaped like an accordion, except that each fold is rectangular. The surface is so smooth, elastic, and strong that it looks like something NASA would be proud to have made. The smell is pleasant. In some ways it looks like an oversized piece of bacon, clean and appetizing. Compared to the Scottish bull carcass, working with the blubber is a dream. The Japanese consider whale blubber a delicacy and eat it raw. It wouldn’t take much for me to get hungry enough to fry the blubber and eat it myself.

  We’re going to fasten the blubber to the hook and draw the shark closer; we’re going to use the salmon as chum. The fish aren’t pretty enough for the European market, or maybe they were suffering from one of the many diseases that occur in farmed salmon pens. It doesn’t really matter because a Greenland shark won’t be picky.

  We roar out of the bay and head for the far side of the Skrova lighthouse, where we fling the perforated sack with the salmon into the water. In Vestfjorden it’s opplætt, as the fishermen say—meaning the lull that gradually sets in after a storm. Even though there’s hardly any wind, it takes time for the sea to calm down. And for all we know, the storm might still be raging far out at sea.

  Just for the heck of it, we also drop in the baited line, with eleven hundred feet of line, twenty feet of chain, and a hook with a thick piece of whale blubber attached. We realize there’s not much chance of attracting a shark today, since the smell of the salmon hasn’t had time to spread very far. But it can’t hurt to try, and we need an excuse for spending several hours out in Vestfjorden.

  —

  It’s raining, but the downpour has a soothing effect on both the sea and our eyes. The water is still, and each individual raindrop can be seen clearly on the surface, which is oily and smooth. If you let your eyes scan the ocean under such conditions, you can take in just about everything.

  We make a quick trip over to Svolvær, where we buy newspapers and a cardboard carton of red wine, and then we stop at a café for sandwiches. Afterward we go back the same way we came and position ourselves just off the Skrova lighthouse. As expected, nothing has happened with the floats. The rain has now stopped. The sea is as smooth as a small inland lake. We read the papers and chat a bit before we head closer to shore, to the back side of the Flæsa islet, to see if we can catch a halibut or at least a cod or pollock on the line. On our way we witness a strange phenomenon. In the middle of the quiet ocean, about five hundred feet away, a huge wave is rising. It quickly grows to many feet in height, and it’s coming toward us. We calmly retreat a short distance. If we’d had wetsuits and boards, we could have surfed that wave. Okay, maybe not us, but someone with skill could have done it. Then the same thing happens again. A huge wave rises up from the smooth water far from land. I look at Hugo. We’ve spent days out in these waters together, but we’ve never observed anything like this before.

  “There must be a shoal there that forces the water upward at great speed when the currents are right,” he says.

  —

  The sun starts to come out. The whole sea seems polished shiny from the rain, shimmering with an even gray glow. We catch nothing but a few small pollock, which we throw back. So we head back to our original position, hoping to see the floats bob under.

  Hugo has a new theory about how the Greenland shark manages to catch fish and animals that are considerably faster. His idea zeroes in on a couple of aspects of the shark’s anatomy.

  “The lunging speed is mostly in the head or jaw, not so much in its body,” he says. “The Greenland shark floats through the water, looking all innocent. If anything gets close, the shark shoves its jaw forward. The jaw isn’t hinged in place, like ours. It’s more like a rail or track or the breechblock of a gun.”

  On one of the animal channels on TV Hugo once saw something that he thinks illustrates his point quite well. The footage showed a scuba diving instructor as he approached a small shark in shallow tropical waters. Oozing with self-confidence and thinking himself master of the situation, he decided to impress the tourists he had taken along for the dive. With the camera rolling, the diver slowly glided toward the seemingly harmless shark until they were face-to-face. As the diver tried to kiss the shark on the mouth, it suddenly struck and bit off a chunk from the guy’s mouth and cheek. The whole thing happened so fast that it was impossible to tell what actually took place until you played it back in slow motion. After the attack, the shark swam off among the coral while the tourists took care of the diver, suddenly in need of major plastic surgery.

  “The Greenland shark has exactly the same kind of jaw,” Hugo goes on.

  There may be some truth to his theory, but it doesn’t explain everything. For instance, why would a salmon get so close to a Greenland shark? And how does the shark catch big wolffish, pollock, and haddock, which all swim much faster?

  “The Greenland shark is cigar-shaped, and its tail is as powerful as a great white shark’s. It can use its tail to bore into whale carcasses, for example. It has the power and everything else it needs to move fast,” Hugo concludes.

  —

  The hours pass. Neither of us has any complaints, and I have no wish to be anywhere else. The landscape is not in front of me. It’s all around me. It’s not something I have to pass through and put behind me. There is a strong sense of here in the physical ocean current near the Skrova lighthouse. It feels very far away from the information current of everyday life in which we usually float.

  I’m semi-reclining in the bow, looking up. We’ve already drifted a thousand feet away from the floats, but they’re still well within sigh
t. Only a few faint waves roll in from open waters.

  The days are growing short, the dark time is only weeks away. A few stars are dimly starting to appear in the north and east; slowly they drift in on the shoreless ocean overhead. I glimpse the contours of a few constellations. But Stella Polaris already shines brightly, its glow so wide that at first Hugo and I think it’s a plane, a weather balloon, or some other unidentified flying object. It looks like the type of exaggerated drawings of the Star of Bethlehem that appear in religious literature. The star points the way to safe harbor for the two wise men in the boat.

  —

  Wanting a better overview, I get out my cell phone. I’ve downloaded an app that uses the camera and the built-in GPS to identify hundreds of constellations above us, or on the back side of the earth, if that happens to be of greater interest.

  All cultures, even in prehistoric times, have seen patterns in the starry heavens, frequently naming them for gods or creatures from their own mythology. The names we use today largely stem from the Greeks, who created intricate stories about most of the constellations they discovered. (Of course no one really “discovered” the constellations, because the constellations are unadulterated products of the human imagination.) For instance, Orion is not really a giant chasing the seven virgins in the constellation Pleiades around the heavenly vault. The Greeks didn’t believe that either. For them the sky was instead a canvas on which they projected their own stories.

  It was a scientific activity, at least in a way, because it was about pattern recognition—something that is essential to science. For fishermen, it was basic science not only to read the ocean, the weather, and the sky, but also to remember and connect the complex patterns that arise. Only through systematic observation done over a long period of time—and making use of an innate cerebral talent—does a person get good at it.